Alex Petersen

I don’t really write much on my site. Well I decided that I am going to write something on my web site because I am bored. Also, I guess that it is not good idea not to make much use of my web site that my brother gave me for the christmas 2 years ago. I am staying at my apartment for the summer. I am all by myself for 1 week before my roommates come to live at my apartment next week. I have an student Co-op job on campus at RIT. Co-op stands for cooperative education which is basically an internship required by RIT in order to meet my graduation requirements. I need to complete at least three quarters of Co-op.

Anyways, 3 days ago, I had the speakers’ volume max on and I got a campus officer pressing my door button to get my attention to go to the door to see what is up with him. He had this angry face and he yelled at me that I have 2 minutes to turn off the speakers or he’d write a report on me. He told me that he can hear my speakers like 100-200 yards away and got a lot of complaints from neighbors. What really bothers me is that I do not understand why a neighbor can’t come over to tell me that I should turn down the volume because I would be really happy to do that. I just closed the door on him and just turned the speaker off for the pissed cop just to make him to go away.

Also, I hate the weather in Rochester, NY because it is like death valley with no air conditioner on my apartment and it is so humid outside. I feel hot here. I already drank like 7 to 10 glasses of water and ice in one day. T_T

Hi everyone… hmm I am not sure if anyone ever visit my web site for now. Who cares about that. You probably guess that I am pretty lazy to write posts on my web site. I am thinking about changing the layout of my web site. I think I don’t like that very much. It seems like there are too much spaces on either side of the web site. Anyways, during the xmas vacation, I have been playing another RPG game on my gamecube called Paper Mario. It is a very funny game. There are times during the game I play, I got fooled by really simple stuff. Asdklfj;asdf, yeah it made me laugh a little bit because I never thought about it.

Well, I have been staying with my family during my xmas break in McCook, Nebraska. I got some presents from my family such as 19 inch LCD monitor for my computer of course.

Oh I forgot to let you know about one thing, I completed one of my projects in my classes at RIT which is a holiday greeting using flash animation to create that. You can view here

Well, I don’t know what else to say in this post so I’ll leave at that for now. Have a late Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy Solistice, Happy Festivus, Happy Kwanza and Happy Hanukkah. Also, Have a Happy New Year very soon.

I played the RPG game called Tales of Symphonia on gamecube. Overall, the game was pretty good and the storyline was very interesting to me. However, I get annoyed by how something in the game are a little bit repetitive. For example, you would go to same “dungeons” two or three times. However, I can’t complain about that because I had fun playing the game. It took me approximately 60 hours to defeat the game. I guess that it is pretty long. Anyways, I will probably buy a game or two before the Christmas so I can have fun playing some game over the break.

Hello all, I am going to be somewhat busy this quarter. I am attending my classes and be a tutor for the deaf students. Also, I found out that my grades for all of my courses last fall is B. That’s not a bad thing because two of the courses last quarter was so boring that I literally slept in their class. I am taking three courses which are Beginning Russian 1, Interactive Design Media (IDM) and Operation System Scripting (OS scripting).

Can you believe that I am actually learning Russian? I thought that it would be cool if I know Russian in case if I travel to Russia and Ukraine with my girlfriend. Also, my girlfriend will teach me Russian Sign Language whenever we have time for that. I hope that OS Scripting will be fun for me because it involves a lot of work on UNIX system. It is something that is more appealing to me because I love to write a program. One class that I will have to be patient with is IDM because I am not very interested in creating flash animations and work on multimedia applications.

Originally, I decided to draw sketches of each objects with bad designs but it was taking me too long to draw each object. Also, I’m not great at drawing so I decided to upload photo versions of the objects. Also, I had some objects that I wrote on my papers to help me remember what objects I should take picture of. This allowed me to put all of these images on web site in one night

Here is the first photo below:

I would hurt my back because I have to press the dust pan against the ground so I can just sweep the dust and dirt in the dust pan. Normally, this shouldn’t be happening like that. Before I used that product, I was thinking in my head that I would just simply lay the dust pan down the ground and sweep these dusts into it. I guess that’ is not in that case with the dust pan I have in my apartment.

Second photo below:

This may not be obvious to you but this is extremely annoying to me because I cannot tell difference between them when they flash light because they look exactly the same to me. For example, when I would be sleeping, I normally ignore the door light strobe because I don’t like to wake up late at night. Often, there would be stupid fire light strobe flashing non-stop for maybe 5-10 minutes, I have hard time figuring out if it is the door or we are having a fire alarm. It forces me to walk close to the wall to find out which it is. I wish that they should seperate it. On a wall, it would only have door strobe light. On another wall, it’d have fire alarm which can help me quickly decide what to do.

Third photo below:

I will say that it is a bad design because I have absolutely no idea what it means to me. Seriously, it looks like smoke detector or something like that but it is labeled “apartment” which confuses me about what it is.

Okay, here is fourth photo below:

You can see that there are too many information printed on right side of the microwave. It might be misleading that the numbers might be based on seconds. Actually, it is in term of minutes. Also, I am pretty sure that I haven’t heard of anybody who would use microwave to fry food for 35 minutes. Not only poor instruction on the right side of microwave can confuse the user on how they can use it but also can endanger their life too. They do nothing to prevent an idiot user from accidently putting some “microwave unsafe” product in the microwave only to set it on fire. One of the rules designers should keep it in their mind that they should be able to help minimize the chance that user can make mistakes when using their products. When they use the product incorrectly, the users would get some hints to help them know that they have made mistakes so they can correct it eventually.

Next is fifth photo of an object with bad design below:

It looks like a good and cheap dish drainer to us right? I would say to the people who read my web site: Do not be fooled by it. There are some problems with it. It is actually smaller than it appears in the photo. They have some physical contraints to help me put the dishes which is fine but I have no where to place the glasses. There is several glass holders but the dishes would already take up almost all of the space preventing me from being able to place dishes in the the glass holder. Eventually, I would have to place it on the top of the dishes. Also, they can hold either 4-5 glasses or 6-7 dishes but not the both. I wish that my roommates and I shouldn’t have bought this dish drainer.

Here is the sixth photo below:

It looks like a simple blender to us. However, there is no buttons to initate blending mixture inside the pitcher. There is no visiblity to indicate how the users can use it. It would cause the users to figure out how they can use it. Apparently, the product actually blends if the users including me push down the top of pitcher’s lid. There is a serious flaw with it. That is, if a user accidently turn the pitcher around a little while pressing it down to blend the mixture together, the pitcher would become loose from the bottom which can spatter the mixture out at a user.

I will show the 7th photo with bad design

I have no idea what “Rocket Dialing” key exactly does for the phone. Does it mean quick redialing or turning the phone into self destructive one. This is because there is no information to let me know what it means. Also, it sounds very silly to me too. Also, I don’t know what flash key does for the phone either. I do not understand why the designers add silly and unnecessary features to their products. They may think that it makes their product look cool or appealing to the customers but it does the opposite otherwise.

This is the eighth photo

I never have seen a bike rack like this in my life. I think it is a poor designed bike rack because it doesnt look like one to me. Also, I don’t understand why it is designed this way to let us put our bike high to hang it on the top of the bike rack. It would require a lot of our energy to be able to do that. I do not do what designer have in ther mind that I would be doing with it. In fact, I just simply lean my bike against the bike rack and put the lock’s chain around it so I can keep my bike locked.

9th picture (actually four pictures) to be shown

You can notice that this is the digital camera I used to take photo of objects with bad designs.

This comes with usb cable which helps connect the digital camera and my computer to allow me upload the image to the computer.

You can see me in the picture attempting to search for the usb port in the camera. I was not able to find it. It took me a while to find it. Guess where I have found the usb port??

You can see that it is located on the right side of the digital camera. The problem is, the text’s color imbeded on the right side of the digital camera is silver which is difficult to read when digital camera appears to be silver to me too. That is the main reason why I had hard time finding the usb port. I believe that designer wanted to make it look more beautiful by doing this approach

Finally, that is the tenth picture for this post (two photos)

It appears that I can open the refridgerator’s right side of the door because it shows that I can pull it. Guess what? I almost attempted to pull it hard because I thought something was wrong with it. Maybe some lock is preventing it from being locked. I feel stupid because I found out that I can open the left side of the refrigerator’s door.

Another photo can show this.

I am currently taking three classes,

1) Introduction to Pyschology on Mondays and Wednesdays
2) Principle of Networking on Mondays and Wednesdays
3) Human Computer Interaction 1 on Tuesdays and Thursdays

Each class has four credits. All of them will have a lot of work to do for this quarter so I have to keep up with the classes to do well. I feel that the class that will give me most challenge is Principle of Networking because I must keep my lab grade above 80% or I will fail the class automatically.

Besides these classes, I plan to do a lot of things for this fall for fun too. Of course, I will run much more this fall. My father just bought the new bike that I picked at the bike shop and I let my girlfriend to ride on the bike. The cool thing is that my girlfriend can ride on bike with me while I’m running outside. We did that few times.

I do not understand how companies such as Microsoft and Sony are advertising its next generation console so aggressively to the market. A console that is very powerful does not mean the games will be very good. Sure, it’ll produce few damn good games for current consoles we have such as PS2, or XBox but most of the games is made for these console isn’t original at all. Most of them are sequels to previous games or based on the movies. I can say at least 3/4 of them are utterly piece of crap and boring. This is becoming more like Atari in 1983 who believes in quantity over quality in hopes to make quick money from selling multiple crappy games. This led to the infamous event called Video game crash of 1983.

Games are supposed to be fun ( original or not) and can be played many times! That is what games is about. I am little frustrated about trying to find a good game because I want to be able to have fun playing games with my girlfriend. I am extremely picky about buying games because I want it to be fun for at least 2 players to play it. However, the problem is so many games are single-player and a lot of multi-player game are boring. I do like single player games but I would rather play with people now. Therefore, I really hope that game company should start creating quality games with multiplayer features for people.

Do you like it? Tell me what you think about it

It seems to be little boring so I will change it in some ways to make it look more fun. You can check my web site in few days to see what is changed.

After I ran for two minutes, Apparently, the persistent bee to chase me out of no where. It was same kind (maybe same one too) of bee that chased me for 2 minutes before I ran to building for the shelter from the bee three days ago. It made me very tired because I was basically running hard just to get away from the damn bee. Because of this, my rountine run have been turned into a workout which shouldn’t happen in my early stage of my training. Today, the bee almost stinged one of my calves. Because of it, I had to sprint all way back to my dorm just to try to avoid him. Two minutes later, I decided to get out of the dorm to run another way but it began to rain. The rain have became torrential. Whenever the weather is good for me to go outside, I just hope I don’t run into bees again. It is very annoying for me to be forced to run hard when time is not right for me to do it.

I am surprised that I do not update my web site often. I guess I was busy with RIT and did not feel like I want to update my web site often during the period. I hope this will change during the summer quarter. I am not sure how busy I will be but I doubt that I will be very busy because the summer quarter will be somewhat slow paced for me. I will be taking three courses for this quarter. I hope to play with my blog site. I plan to develop my picture and scan them so I can upload it to this web site so you can watch them if you want to.

I hope to play with different things on my own. For example, I want to try to play with the program called “Wink”, it is a program that creates animations to teach people how to use the program in a right way. I will probably be paid for it if I have time to develop it for my brother. Also, I want to try to find a job that I can be paid well for this summer. I am not sure if I will get a job this summer. It will be okay if I cannot find a job for this summer depending on my schedule.

My girlfriend and I visited my family in Nebraska for couple weeks. It was fun because it was a nice break for us from school. I guess that’s it

It looks like we won’t be planning a lan party because we have problems of finding the equipments for the lan party. Also, it appears to be too much for me to try to plan the event in the future so I decide that I am not going to do it. I am staying here during the spring break so I will be pretty much bored. However, during the spring break, I will attempt to do some of fun things such as construct my first applet for the web site. I want to try to build a simple calculator that I can use on the web site. It will be a interesting project for me.

I am thinking about installing Debain Linux on my computer and just play around with it to have fun. What’s else? I’ll probably play some games with my friends during the break to have fun before I get to be ready for the spring quarter.

I haven’t been doing much with the web site since the Christmas break. I am focusing on my education and being lazy at the same time for the winter. I recently attended the lan party which hosted a RTS tourney where all participants play four different RTS games in four rounds and the winner wins a free 250 gig of hd when he goes 4-0 in 4 rounds. The tourney was somewhat not successful because a large percent of players did not know how to play at least 2 games including me. They set up the tourney only to attract more players who doesn’t play fps to the lan party because most of people at the lan party plays FPS which is what annoyed me and my roommate.

I am not sure if my friend and I will host a lan party before end of the spring quarter. However, I just want to start with this, my friend and I am probably going to try to plan a small lan party (appromixately 20-40 people) exclusively for RTS game. I doubt that we will offer any prizes for the lan party. However, I am sure that the people can give us some money just to order some food such as pizzas and pops. However, the problem is to find the equipments that is to be used during the lan party and find a room big enough to support the number of people attending to be reserved.

I will be doing a lot of work on the site during my spring break such as adding more pictures and make my site look better. Also, you can click on the link: my schedule for the spring quarter Also, my major changed from Applied Computer Technology to Information Technology which is right on the track to get my BS degree in approximately 2 1/2 to 3 years.

I just added the link to my web site’s gallery page. You can access the gallery’s page by clicking on the link named “gallery” on the right column. I am going to upload more pictures to my web site so you can take a look at it. I am probably thinking about have my background’s color be light blue instead of white and change the layout a little bit. It will still be a simple web site. Also, I am thinking about creating a simple java applet and test on the web site to see if the web site can handle a java applet.

I just got myself a new domain which is named www.alexpetersen.net for the Christmas. I want to say thanks to my brother Brandon Petersen. I am going to see what I can do with it. Most of time, I will probably try to build some java applet to test on my web site. Also, i’m staying with my family in Nebraska until I fly back to Rochester in beginning of the January. Well, that’s it, I’m heading off.

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